Further adventures of dance's inspired outsider Dismissing classical ballet as 'flower arrangement', choreographer Lloyd Newson has taken his DV8 troupe to the highest echelons of contemporary dance. Ismene Brown meets him for The Daily Telegraph.

"There is a saying that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world but the unreasonable man tries to make the world adapt to him; therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man." The choreographer Lloyd Newson smiles at me as he quotes GB Shaw's aphorism.

He can't help looking patronising as he does so, but I will stand a lecture from Newson, because I am so often enraptured by his dance productions for his now internationally renowned company, DV8 Physical Theatre. A good picture is worth a thousand worthy words, and Newson's stage pictures can cling to your mind for years.

Brand new or just brand, asked the message board as we left DV8's Living Costs at Tate Modern. Well, not brand new: it is a partial though substantial reworking of Cost of Living (2000). Just brand? A much more pertinent question, and a central theme of Lloyd Newson's piece, which takes the audience on a tour through the Tate, with scenes from low-art clowning to high-art ballet, by way of vaudeville, pop, circus and fashion.

THIS is a mess. But that’s exactly what it is meant to be. Living Costs is a helter-skelter promenade performance that turns the galleries of Tate Modern into a boutique where a variety of values are on display. DV8’s evening begins with the appearance of our hostess (Wendy Houstoun). She’s in matronly black with a strand of inept fake pearls. After making certain that all our headsets are working, she brusquely herds us off around the building. The process is a little like trying to navigate Heathrow with a package-holiday crowd that won’t get out of your way.

In DV8's promenade performance at Tate Modern, the former power station is the star. Whatever message Newson intends to put across is dwarfed by the volume of space in which we watch the dancers and each other; 250 spectators are herded from the Turbine Hall up to the top floor by bossy Wendy Houstoun and vigilant gallery staff. No straying allowed, although DV8, as its name suggests, prides itself on nonconformity.

Given the entire echoing building to play with, Newson opts to take his audience on a dark, guided walk with cabaret turns from the floor of the Turbine Hall to the famous café at the top, with "taste" becoming more refined on each successive level. Herded into groups, heads clamped with earphones, we promenaders are naturally braced for confrontation. But Lloyd lets his public off pretty lightly.

On the ground floor we are confronted by a ghastly community singsong (there's no escape: you sing), a display of expletive, head-banging pogo-dance, and an extraordinary TV-type game.

Living Costs, Tate Modern, London By Nadine Meisner for The Independent

This is a DV8 Physical Theatre show that expects obedient spectators, the way that site-specific promenade shows tend to expect them. Wendy Houstoun raps out, like an irritating gym teacher: "Move forward, move back, sit down. Quickly!" Back-up enforcement comes from other ushers, who include DV8's founding director, Lloyd Newson. They keep you in order as you progress from one video or physical event to another through Tate Modern. You are tagged with different coloured bracelets, given headphones to listen to the music, and late-comers are harangued.

My friend Leslie and I arrived a couple of minutes late, turning the evening into an interactive performance.

"One of the reasons I left mainstream dance was because you weren’t allowed to show any failure on stage", explains Lloyd Newson, DV8's dynamic Artist Director.

"Everything was about perfection. Life for me is all about failing, trying to learn from those changes: If you take failure out of a piece of art - if you don’t look at the fat, old or disabled - how do you start talking about art?"

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